202 Botanical Illustration [ch. 



the owner's enthusiasm for his task. The stanza at the 

 beginning of the last section seems to show some anxiety on 

 the part of the author, lest the reader should have begun to 

 weary over the lengthy occupation of colouring the plates. 

 It reads as follows : — 



"If hethertoe (my frende) you have, 

 Performde the taske in hand : 

 With ioy proceede, this last will be 

 The best, when all is scande." 



As we have already mentioned, it is not our intention 

 to deal with the books published in the latter part of the 

 seventeenth century. We may, however, for the sake of 

 completeness, mention two or three examples in order to 

 show the kind of work that was then being done. Paolo 

 Boccone's ' Icones et Descriptiones ' of 1674 was illustrated 

 with copper-plates, some of which were remarkably subtle 

 and delicate, while others were rather carelessly executed. 

 Among slightly later works, we may refer to a quaint little 

 Dutch herbal by Stephen Blankaart, and to the ' Para- 

 disus Batavus ' of Paul Hermann, both of which belong to 

 the last decade of the century. The latter, which is an 

 "Elzevir" with very good copper-plates, was published 

 after the author's death, and dedicated, by his widow, to 

 Henry Compton, Bishop of London. 



In the plates which illustrate Blankaart's herbal, a 

 landscape and figures are often introduced to form a back- 

 ground, and the low horizon, to which we referred in 

 speaking of the ' Hortus Floridus,' is a very conspicuous 

 feature. The picture of the Winter Cherry is here re- 

 produced as an example (Text-fig. 106). As showing the 

 complete revolution in the style of plant illustration in two 

 hundred years, it is interesting to compare this drawing 

 with that of the same subject in the German 'Herbarius' 

 of 1485 (Text-fig. 78). It must be confessed that the 

 fifteenth-century wood-cut, though far less detailed and 

 painstaking, seizes the general character of the plant in 

 a way that the seventeenth-century copper-plate somewhat 

 misses. 



Etching and engraving on metal are well adapted to 

 very delicate and detailed work, but from the point of 

 view of book-illustration, wood-engraving is generally more 

 effective. In the latter the lines are raised, and the 



